As they say: in space, no one can hear you scream… but your fellow astronauts can see you die, and death in space presents so many practical, psychological and moral challenges to NASA that they recently teamed up to with Swedish ecologists Susanne Wiigh-Masak and Peter Masak to invent the first ever space coffin.

The Masaks are the inventors of an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation or burial, called Promession, which involves freezing the body, shattering it into tiny pieces and then freezing those pieces again… a technology NASA very much wants to use in a manned visit to Mars that is tentatively scheduled for the mid-2030s.

How would it be adapted for spaceflight?

The dead crew member’s body would be placed in a container, called the Body Back, and moved into the airlock. Exposed to space, the body freezes in about an hour. A robotic arm then pulls the Body Back container out of the airlock, dangles it on a tether, and activates a vibration system. (The tether prevents vibration damage to the spacecraft’s instrumentation.) After 15 minutes of vibration, the frozen corpse is reduced to small pieces. Water is evaporated from the remains using microwaves, leaving about 25 kilograms of dry powder inside the Body Back. The container is left outside the spacecraft until it’s time to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, at which point the robotic arm pulls it back inside to keep it from burning up during reentry. The Body Back folds into a smaller shape that “will not unveil that there is a corpus inside.”

In other words, if an astronaut dies on the way to Mars, he’ll be pushed out the space lock until his eye jelly freezes, then ground up into a fine powder to be brought back home.

Reader Comments

NoMoreMghz

You are purposely trying to make this sound more gruesome in title and your own supplementary description.. talking about an arm pulverizing the body, shattering it apart and so on. Stop being so rediculous. Its just vibrated to small parts. There is no smashing, mangling, grinding or other abusive action here. Dope.